California Purchases 10 Nissan LEAFs…Thousands Soon?

This overhead shot certainly shows the Nissan LEAF's in its most stylish perpsective.

We might not of mentioned this before, but electric vehicles and fleets make for a near-perfect match. The fleets saves countless thousands of dollars in operational costs and electric vehicle manufacturers find a near-endless outlet for plug-in vehicle sales.

It should come as no surprisethen, that the California Department of General Services replaced 10 of it ICE fleet vehicles with an equal amount of zero-emission Nissan LEAFs. Well, it’s a bit surprising that only LEAFs were chosen and not a single Chevy Volt, Ford Focus Electric or even a Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid, but that’s the choice of California’s General Services department and who are we to question its decision.

Nissan LEAF in profile.

In addition to the 10 LEAFs, the department opened 24 plug-in vehicle charging stations in 5 locations in the Sacramento area. Of the 24 stations, 19 will be accessible to the general public and future plans call for at least 9 more to be installed soon.

California’s short-term goal is to replace at least 10 percent of its light-duty vehicle fleet with zero-emissions vehicles by 2015 and 25 percent by 2020. It’s estimated that the state owns somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,000 light-duty passenger vehicles. If the state hits that mark, then we’d expect the install of government-funded charging stations to rise dramatically in the coming years. Hopefully, California will continue to allow the general public to use a percentage of those chargers. If so, then it’s a win for all.

I hope one of InsideEV’s editors or copy-editors will give this article the once-over and correct the numerous errors in grammar, including the one in the first sentence. (Starting the first sentence– indeed, the first two paragraphs– with a conjunction is not exactly good journalism, either.) This isn’t the first time that an article has been posted here before receiving proper editing. InsideEVs is one of my favorite websites, but y’all need to up your game on the editing side. On the positive side, this writer does know the difference between “its” and “it’s”!

Article repair in progress! Grammatical problems (and other occasional issues) are a double-edged sword for us.

To avoid them, we would have hold stories in the queue until they can be edited, which is a mon-fri 7am-11am type job. Currently, the site prides itself for putting out content 7 days a week, and sometimes at 1am in the morning (if something warrants it), which no other site (as far as we know) does. The only way this is a possibility is by allowing some of the writers to publish direct.

City of Seattle purchased 35+ Leafs over a year ago:http://green.autoblog.com/2011/07/29/city-of-seattle-buys-35-nissan-leafs/
Get with it California, you were leading the EV revolution 10 years ago, now your trailing behind. DC Fast charger rollout is a joke in California. We can drive all the way from Vancouver BC to the California border with DC Fast Chargers in a Leaf, then you have to turn around as there is nothing in California for 500+ miles.

Just completed a 676 mile trip using the DC Fast Chargers from Seattle to Eugene Oregon in our Leaf over the Christmas holiday.